He felt his hair softly rising. DORASTUS She had large violet eyes, of a melancholy effect, and fine honey-colored hair, flowing smoothly over her ears. She looked excessively meek and always a little apprehensive, as if accustomed to reproaches, yet never quite hardened to them. One easily supposed her to be an orphan. She lived with an aunt, her mother's half-sister, considerably older and less pleasing than her mother in that charming woman's brief day. Her cousins were all older than she; the girls were so perfect in every respect that intimacy between her and them was out of the question; the son, a big, blunt young man, was mostly away, and, when at home, too much taken up with other interests to be more than just aware of the violet eyes. So, life was very dull for Emmeline--"Emmie" she was familiarly called. She went often of an evening to her mother's grave, and, sitting beside it, reflected how it was in keeping with the general sadness of things that there should be no prospect of any change for her in all the years of her life, no change from the present weary round of aunt and cousins, of sterile duties and insipid pleasures. And there, by her mother's grave, came the very change she was sighing for. She sat on the sward, musingly watching the square tower of the church grow gray against the delicate, flushed sky, when she became aware of a stranger going from stone to stone in the fading light, examining the inscriptions. At first she was afraid. While she debated whether to hide or flee, the stranger approached, and in a foreign voice and accent asked some common question about the place. She could not answer readily for a foolish shame mixed with terror. She got to her feet, blushing, then turning pale. It could be none other than the astonishing fiddler who had played the night before in the hall at Colthorpe, and who could, they said, make your hair rise on end by the power of weird, unearthly music, or your eyes dissolve with tenderness--as he chose. She stared without speech into his dark, peculiar face. And he, seeing that she was discomfited, instead of apologizing and withdrawing, undertook, in a tone as persuasive as his violin's, to set her at ease. And when a few days later he disappeared from that part of the world, the violet eyes disappeared too. Aunt Lucretia in time received a letter, asking her forgiveness and announcing Emmie's marriage.